UK Electric is a family-owned electrical company based in Peoria, Arizona. Their services include commercial TI and maintenance, LED retrofits, full store retrofits and remodels for grocery stores, and more. They believe in keeping the customer first and providing great value, while ensuring the safety of all of their employees on the job site.
in average profit margin
on scheduling, and data entry process
on time cards and payroll
When Nathan Kohatsu took the leading role at his family-owned electrical company, UK Electric, he inherited a well-established and successful business. However, as is the case with any longstanding business there were plenty of outdated processes in place.
These processes had worked well at one point in time, but as the company grew and modernized, they weren’t as effective. After acquiring another company and doubling their headcount, Nathan knew that hand-written time sheets, texted schedules, and a filing cabinet with project plans weren’t efficient enough for his family’s quickly growing business. In need of a centralized, easy to use project management platform which could sync with QuickBooks, Nathan turned to Knowify.
“I couldn’t keep track of everything. I couldn’t easily take a 3-month look ahead to see if we were bidding or winning enough work. I just needed the one lynchpin system to keep track of it all.”
Along with acquiring a new company, Nathan and UK electric inherited a lot of process – the acquired company had done things slightly differently than Nathan’s existing company. Schedules were written on a whiteboard in the office, and pictures of the whiteboard were texted to employees to keep them in the loop. Time sheets were hand-written, and needed to be turned in manually. Project info was kept in a filing cabinet, which meant rifling through a stack of paperwork whenever the team wanted to check something. Perhaps most frustrating, to update UK Electric’s time tracking solution they had to kick everyone out of their project management tool.
On their own each of these processes was somewhat annoying and time-consuming. Altogether, they led to miscommunication, hours of time wasted, and a lack of visibility into how the business was performing. This meant Nathan had to be extremely hands-on with small details of most jobs, acting as a pseudo project manager in addition to running the business.
On top of all that manual process, Nathan had another challenge – half of his team worked on contract jobs and the other half performed service work. These teams worked at different times of day, with very different clients, and had unique workflows. As he searched for software to make the team more efficient, Nathan kept running into the same issue. None of the solutions he evaluated were flexible enough to meet his specific needs. Their pricing was tied to a specific number of locations, they had difficult to use interfaces, or they couldn’t accommodate contract and service work in the same platform.
